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The plug makes sense on a financial level: West’s GOOD Music is releasing Man on the Moon II in association with Universal Motown. “He is my favorite living artist and not just cause he’s on my label.” “Please go pre order Kid Cudi’s album,” West tweeted recently. Before West found Cudi, his main contribution was a free-download mixtape distributed by clothing line 10.Deep his next was a contribution to West’s 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak. Wale complained that Kanye West, who is Cudi’s mentor, hadn’t offered him any beats in response, Cudi told Complex magazine, constrasting himself to Wale, “We don’t fuck with you musically.” The phrase is now emblazoned on a virally distributed T-shirt.Ĭudi and West are in fact a “we,” and that is Cudi’s strongest asset. Asher Roth came and went, leaving a slight aftertaste of shame Charles Hamilton’s high volume of output couldn’t compensate for his lack of sanity and Wale put out a much celebrated mixtape, but flopped with a full-length and failed to make any friends. It’s an ambitious sound and an of-the-moment sound, which is what propels Cudi to the near-top of his cohort: the magazine XXL put Cudi on its cover for the Class of 2009 issue, and only B.o.B. Poor stylistic choices, juvenile party lyrics and oversimplified self-examination plague the overlong, uneven Man on the Moon II, just as they did its predecessor.Ĭudi makes neopseychedelic (or just faux-futuristic and druggy) hip-hop, built around beats that could be flipped passages from rock operas. It’s a trick question: “Please, please don’t play this song,” he continues over a dour track of strings and spacey drums.
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“Wanna know what I sound like when I’m not on drugs?” Cudi asks on the song’s chorus. “Wearing a kilt, he must be gay,” Cudi raps, echoing his detractors, on “ Don’t Play This Song.” But bad fashion and ignorant internet commenters don’t make you interesting, they just make you poorly dressed and a citizen of the same internet as all the rest of us. But how he wishes his character and compositions were complicated! Tech-savvy and self-obsessed at their most facile, so is Kid Cudi. Born in 1984, even generous demographic definitions place Cudi, né Scott Mescudi, past the latter bookend of Gen X, and into Y, or the Millennials. “I promise you some Generation X shit,” raps Kid Cudi on the first song of his sophomore album, Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr.